Wings Free with Bonus Material (3 page)

SATURDAY MORNING, LAUREL’S EYES FLUTTERED OPEN
at sunrise. She didn’t mind—she was a morning person, always had been. She usually woke about an hour before her parents and it gave her a chance to take a walk by herself and enjoy the sun on her back and the wind on her cheeks before she had to go spend hours indoors at school.

After pulling on a sundress, she grabbed her mom’s old guitar from its case by the back door before slipping silently out to enjoy the crisp quiet of the early morning. Late September had chased away the bright, clear mornings and brought instead the fog that rolled off the ocean and lingered over the town until early afternoon.

She walked along a short path that snaked through her backyard. Despite the small size of the house, the lot was fairly large and Laurel’s parents had talked of possibly adding on someday. The yard had several trees that shaded the house, and Laurel had spent almost a month helping
her mom plant bunches of flowers and vines all along the exterior walls.

Their house was one in a line of homes, so they had neighbors on both sides, but like many of the homes in Crescent City, their backyard ran into undeveloped forest. Laurel usually took her walks into the twisting paths of the small glen and to the creek that ran through the middle of it, parallel to the line of houses.

Today she wandered down to the creek and sat on the bank. She pushed her feet into the chilly water that was clear and cool in the mornings before the water bugs and gnats ventured out and dotted the surface, looking for bits of food.

Laurel set her guitar on her knee and began to strum a few random chords, picking out a bit of a melody after a while. It was nice to fill the space around her with music. She’d started playing three years ago when she’d found her mom’s old guitar in the attic. It was in dire need of new strings and some major tuning, but Laurel convinced her mom to get it fixed up. Her mom had told her the guitar was hers now, but Laurel still liked to think of it as her mom’s; it made it seem more romantic. Like an old heirloom.

An insect landed on her shoulder and began to walk down her back. As Laurel swatted at it her fingers touched something. She stretched her arm back a little farther and felt for it again. It was still there; a round bump, just barely big enough to feel under her skin. She craned her neck but couldn’t see anything past her shoulder. She touched it again, trying to
figure out what it was. Finally she stood, frustrated, and headed back to the house in search of a mirror.

After locking the bathroom door, Laurel sat on the vanity, twisting until she could see her back in the mirror. She pulled the top of her sundress down and searched for the bump. She finally spotted it right between her shoulder blades—a tiny, raised circle that blended in with the skin around it. It was barely noticeable but definitely there. She poked it tentatively—it didn’t hurt, but poking it did provoke a sort of tingling feeling. It looked like a zit.
That’s comforting
, Laurel thought wryly.
In a completely non-comforting way.

Laurel heard her mother’s soft steps creak down the hall and poked her head out the bathroom door. “Mom?”

“Kitchen,” her mom called with a yawn.

Laurel followed her voice. “I have a bump on my back. Could you look at it?” she asked, turning around.

Her mom pushed on it softly a few times. “Just a zit,” she concluded.

“That’s what I figured,” Laurel said, letting the top of her dress snap back up.

“You don’t really get zits.” She hesitated. “Have you started…you know?”

Laurel shook her head quickly. “Just a fluke.” Her voice was flat and her smile was sharp. “All part of puberty, like you always say.” She turned and fled before her mother could ask any more questions.

Back in her room she sat on her bed, fingering the small bump. It made her feel strangely normal to get her first zit; like
a rite of passage. She hadn’t experienced puberty quite like the textbooks described it. She never got zits and, although her chest and hips had developed the way they were supposed to—a little early, actually—at fifteen and a half she still hadn’t started her period.

Her mom always shrugged it off, saying that because they had no idea what her biological mother’s medical history was, they couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a perfectly normal family trait. But she could tell that her mom was starting to get worried.

Laurel dressed in her usual tank top and jeans and started to pull her hair into a ponytail. Then she thought of the irritated blemishes she occasionally saw dotting other girls’ backs in the locker room and left her hair down. Just in case the bump developed into something ugly later on.

Especially at David’s house. That would suck.

Laurel grabbed an apple as she walked out the door and called good-bye to her mom. She was almost to David’s house when she looked up and saw Chelsea jogging the other way. Laurel waved and called to her.

“Hey!” Chelsea said, smiling as her curls blew lightly around her face.

“Hi,” Laurel said with a smile. “I didn’t know you were a runner.”

“Cross-country. Usually I practice with the team, but on Saturdays we’re on our own. What are you doing?”

“I’m headed to David’s,” Laurel said. “We’re going to study.”

Chelsea laughed. “Well, welcome to the David Lawson fan club. I’m already president, but you can be treasurer.”

“It’s not like that,” Laurel said, not completely sure she was telling the truth. “We’re just going to study. I have a bio test on Monday that I’m totally going to blow without some serious intervention.”

“He’s just around the corner. I’ll walk you there.”

They rounded the corner and heard the mower. David didn’t see them as they walked up and they both stood there, watching.

He was pushing a lawn mower through the thick grass, wearing only a pair of jeans and old tennis shoes. His chest and arms were long and wiry but corded with lean muscle—his skin was tanned from the sun and glistened with a light sheen of sweat as he moved almost gracefully in the gentle morning sunlight.

Laurel couldn’t help but stare.

She’d seen guys running around without shirts countless times, but somehow this was different. She watched his arms flex as he reached a particularly thick patch of grass and had to force the mower to keep going. Her chest felt a little tight.

“I think I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Chelsea said, not bothering to hide the appreciation in her eyes.

As if feeling them watching, David suddenly looked up and met Laurel’s eyes. She dropped her chin and studied her feet.

Chelsea didn’t even blink.

By the time Laurel looked up again, David was pulling on a shirt. “Hey, guys. You’re up early.”

“Is it early still?” Laurel asked. It was almost nine o’clock, after all. “Oh,” she said, embarrassed, “I forgot to call.”

David shrugged with a grin. “That’s okay.” He gestured at the lawn mower. “I’m up.”

“Well, I gotta run,” Chelsea said, her breathlessness back rather suddenly. “Literally.” She turned so only Laurel could see her face and mouthed, “Wow!” before waving at them both and sprinting down the street.

David chuckled and shook his head as he watched her go. Then he turned to Laurel and pointed toward his house. “Shall we? Biology waits for no man.”

After the tests were handed in on Monday, David turned to Laurel. “So, how bad was it, really?”

Laurel grinned. “Fine, it wasn’t that bad. But only because of your help.” They’d studied for about three hours on Saturday and had talked for another hour on Sunday night. Granted, the phone conversation had nothing to do with biology, but perhaps she had learned something by osmosis. Osmosis over the phone. Right.

He hesitated for just a second before saying, “We could make it a regular thing. Studying together, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Laurel said, liking the idea of more quiet “study” sessions with him. “And next time you could come to my house,” she added.

“Great.”

It was raining by the time class let out that day, so the group gathered under a small pavilion instead. Almost no one ate there because there were no picnic tables or cement underneath, but Laurel liked the bumpy patch of grass that never seemed to dry all the way—even with the roof overhead.

When it rained, most of the group stayed inside, but today David and Chelsea joined her as well as a guy named Ryan. David and Ryan threw bits of bread at each other and Chelsea commentated—critiquing their aim, throwing form, and inability to keep from hitting spectators.

“Okay, that one was on purpose,” Chelsea said, picking up a piece of crust that had hit her square in the chest and flicking it back over to the guys.

“Nah, it was an accident,” Ryan said. “You’re the one who told me I couldn’t hit
anything
I aimed for.”

“Then maybe you should aim for me so I can be assured of not being assaulted,” she shot back. She sighed and turned to Laurel. “I was
not
meant to live in northern California,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. “During the summer my hair does fine, but introduce a little rain and
bam
! It turns into this.” Chelsea had long brown hair with a tinge of auburn that fell in ringlets down her back. Soft, silky ringlets on sunny days, and jumping, coarse ringlets that bounced out of control around her face when the air was cold and humid—which was about half the time. She had light gray eyes that reminded Laurel of the ocean when the sun was just rising, and the waves had an endless quality to them in the murky half-darkness.

“I think it’s pretty,” Laurel said.

“That’s because it’s not yours. I have to use special shampoos and conditioners just to be able to brush through it every day.” She looked over at Laurel and touched her straight, smooth hair for a second. “Yours feels nice; what do you use?”

“Oh, just whatever.”

“Hmm.” Chelsea touched her hair one more time. “Do you use a leave-in conditioner? That usually works the best with mine.”

Laurel took a breath and let it out noisily. “Actually…I don’t put anything on it. Any kind of conditioner makes my hair really slick and oily-feeling. And if I use shampoo, it makes my hair really, really dry—even the moisturizing kind.”

“So you just don’t wash it?” The idea was apparently beyond foreign to Chelsea.

“I rinse it really well. I mean, it’s clean and everything.”

“But no shampoo at all?”

Laurel shook her head and waited for a skeptical comment, but Chelsea just muttered, “Lucky,” and turned back to her lunch.

That night Laurel examined her hair closely. Did she need to wash it? But it looked and felt the same as it always did. She turned her back to the mirror and poked and prodded the bump. It had been a tiny thing on Saturday morning, but over the weekend it had grown pretty big. “Hell of a first zit,” Laurel grumbled to her reflection.

The next morning, Laurel woke up to a dull tingling between her shoulder blades. Trying not to panic, she hurried into the bathroom and craned her neck to look at her back in the mirror.

The bump was bigger around than a quarter!

This was no zit. She touched it carefully, and a strange tingling sensation lingered everywhere her fingers brushed. In a panic
she clutched her nightgown to her chest and ran down the hall to her parents’ room. She had just raised her hand to knock when she forced herself to stop and take a few breaths.

Laurel looked down at herself and suddenly felt very foolish. What was she thinking? She was standing in the hallway in little more than her underwear. Mortified, she stepped away from her parents’ door and crept back to the bathroom, shutting the door as quickly and quietly as she could. She turned her back to the mirror again and studied the lump. She turned to view it from a few different angles until she convinced herself it wasn’t nearly as big as she’d thought.

Laurel had been raised on the idea that the human body knew how to take care of itself. Most things—if left alone—would clear up by themselves. Both her parents lived that way. They never went to the doctor, not even for antibiotics.

“It’s just a humongous zit. It will go away on its own,” Laurel told her reflection, her tone sounding exactly like her mother’s.

She dug into her mother’s drawer and found a tub of the salve her mom made every year. It had rosemary, lavender, tea-tree oil, and who knew what else in it, and her mom put it on everything.

It couldn’t hurt.

Laurel scooped up a fingerful of the sweet-smelling salve and began rubbing it on her back. Between the tingle of her hands irritating the bump and the burn of the tea-tree oil, Laurel’s back was on fire as she pulled her nightgown over her head and, with her shoulders pressed to the wall, scooted to her room.

She chose a loose-fitting baseball-style T-shirt with cap sleeves and a full back for today. Most of her tanks would
probably
conceal the bump, but Laurel didn’t want to take any chances. This thing couldn’t get much bigger without becoming all gross, and when it did, Laurel would rather have it hidden beneath a shirt. It tingled every time anything brushed against it—her long hair, the T-shirt as she pulled it over her head—and, of course, every time she touched it, trying to remind herself it was real. By the time she headed downstairs, she was convinced every nerve in her body was connected to the bump.

By the time Thursday rolled around, Laurel could no longer deny that whatever this thing was on her back, it wasn’t a zit. Not only had it continued growing the last two days, it seemed to be growing
faster
. That morning it was the size of a golf ball.

Laurel had come down to breakfast determined to tell her parents about the weird bump. She’d even taken a breath and opened her mouth to just blurt it out. But at the last second she’d wimped out and simply asked her dad to pass the cantaloupe.

Between the T-shirts she’d been wearing the last few days and keeping her long hair loose, no one had noticed the bump yet, but it was only a matter of time—especially if it kept getting bigger.
If
, Laurel repeated to herself,
if it gets bigger. Maybe Mom’s stuff did the trick.